CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; The Photos That Changed Pollock's Life

By SARAH BOXER

Published: December 15, 1998

The figure of Jackson Pollock -- action painter, dancing dripper, sullen rebel -- was formed in Hans Namuth's camera. Namuth's camera helped make Pollock famous, Namuth's camera was blamed for Pollock's demise and, after Pollock died in a car crash in 1956, Namuth's camera tried to catch the artist in his coffin. (The funeral home didn't allow it.)

Now, on the occasion of Pollock's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Namuth's camera is there again. Namuth himself died eight years ago (also in a car crash). But his photographs and films are being used to strip away the layers of paint and lore that have covered Pollock since the 1950's. Of course, the stripping is tricky, because Pollock's tortured relationship with Namuth is itself part of the myth.

In the late summer of 1950, Namuth, a photographer for Harper's Bazaar with a marginal interest in Pollock, arranged to shoot him painting in his studio. But when Namuth got to Pollock's house in Springs, in East Hampton, N.Y., he was told there was nothing to shoot. Pollock had just finished a painting. He and Lee Krasner, his wife, took Namuth out to the barn to look.

''A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor,'' Namuth recalled in ''Pollock Painting'' (1980), a book of his photographs. ''Blinding shafts of sunlight hit the wet canvas, making its surface hard to see. There was complete silence.'' Namuth went on: ''Pollock looked at the painting. Then unexpectedly, he picked up can and paintbrush and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dancelike as he flung black, white and rust-colored paint onto the canvas.''

Namuth started photographing Pollock at work on the painting that would become ''One: No. 31, 1950.'' Krasner sat on a high stool, watching.

When Namuth showed the proofs to Pollock and Krasner, they let him loose in the studio. Namuth took more photographs, capturing the beginning stages of ''Autumn Rhythm: No. 30, 1950.'' But it was not enough.

Namuth decided he wanted to catch the painter in motion. He shot a black-and-white film of Pollock painting, first from eye level, then from a loft high above the barn floor. Still not enough.

Namuth wanted a movie of Pollock in color. Paul Falkenberg, a film editor who had worked with Fritz Lang, agreed to help. At first Namuth filmed Pollock painting outside on a red canvas that is now lost. Pollock did a strenuous grapevine dance step as he worked along the length of the canvas. Namuth got Pollock's characteristic strokes: the way he drew with paint by gently rotating his wrist, finishing with his palm up, and the way he splatted by snapping his wrist and finishing with his palm down. Still not enough.

Namuth was unhappy about having to choose between focusing on the painting or on Pollock. He wanted to catch painter and paint at once. Finally, as Namuth remembered later, he dreamed up a solution: ''The painting would have to be on glass, and I would film from underneath.''

Pollock built a wooden platform to hold the glass. And Namuth crouched under it to ''record the loops of liquid paint as they fell,'' as Barbara Rose, an art historian and critic, wrote in an essay in ''Pollock Painting.'' As Pollock painted on the glass, the paint covered up his view of Namuth beneath him, but in the film it was just the opposite: Pollock's face and figure were gradually veiled by his own paint.

At last, the marathon photography session ended dramatically on a cold November day in 1950. Namuth and Pollock were winding up their work. Krasner was inside the house preparing a feast to celebrate the end of the filming. Pollock was tense. As the 1989 biography ''Jackson Pollock: An American Saga,'' by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, tells it, Pollock was sick of putting on his paint-spattered boots again and again for the camera, shaking an object out of one boot again and again, getting ready to paint again and again, and asking Namuth again and again: ''Should I do it now, Hans?'' He was ready to blow.

When Pollock and Namuth came in from outside, blue from the cold, the first thing Pollock did was pour himself a tumbler of bourbon. It was the beginning of the end. Pollock had been sober (some say) for two years. Soon Namuth and Pollock got into an argument -- a volley of ''I'm not a phony, you're a phony.'' Then Pollock tore a strap of cowbells off the wall and started swinging it around.

With the dinner guests seated and food on the table, Pollock and Namuth continued to argue. Finally Pollock grabbed the end of the table, shouting ''Should I do it now?'' to Namuth. ''Now?'' Then he turned over the whole table, plates, glasses, meat, gravy and all. (There is a scholarly disagreement about whether it was turkey or roast beef.) The dogs lapped at the glassy gravy. Krasner said, ''Coffee will be served in the living room.''

After that night, Pollock never stopped drinking. He didn't bring in the glass painting (''No. 29, 1950'') until it was covered with rain and leaves. He returned to a more figurative style of painting. Six years later, bloated, depressed and drunk, he drove his car into a tree, killing himself and a friend.